Surfer Dude Comes Up With The Answer To Life, The Universe and Everything

And it's not 42 after all.

For more than a century, physicists have tried to concoct a theory that ties the two most successful theories together. Einstein's theory of relativity and Heisenberg's quantum mechanics have been confirmed by observation. Nevertheless, no one has yet formed a theory that allowed the two to work together.

The theory that would do that has been called the "Unified Field Theory" or more colloquially, "The Theory of Everything."

Scientists have pounded their head against the wall seeking the Theory of Everything for generations. But, just as it took a patent clerk to derive the Theory of Relativity, it took a surfer dude to scribble out the Theory of Everything.

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Now, how cool is that?